Napier's Bones (31 page)

The former
shadow winced and ducked, but if one hand missed, even if twenty of them did,
others found their mark. Suddenly Napier was himself an impossible number of
alternates, each one grimacing in agony as the numbers that had helped maintain
his existence abandoned their positions.

Napier, all of
the Napiers, screamed with rage, with fear, and fought back with everything
he—they—had, an explosion of numbers rising from the ground, falling from the
sky, spilling from the sea, all collapsing in on him as he sought their help.
He waved his arms and built up impossible-seeming torrents of formulae, a
last-ditch attempt to save himself and defeat Jenna, and Dom was momentarily
thrown to his knees by the rampaging winds and shaking earth, but every Jenna
still stood, now implacable. With one last flurry of motion, an angry swarm of
numbers jumped from the top of Napier’s head and skittered across the beach to
the dolphins, and each dying animal opened itself to accept the numbers.

Napier collapsed
and at the same time Dom felt a wrenching sensation inside his body, but behind
where Napier had stood Archimedes stayed in one piece, the final numbers that
Dom only just now noticed had tied him to Napier shedding away from his body
and dropping to the beach. “Thank you,” he whispered, and several Jennas turned
their attentions from the dolphins long enough to nod in response.

“By God,” said
Billy, his own accent stronger now. Dom turned, alarmed to hear his voice come
from somewhere else and saw that the poet was standing beside him, now in his
real body as well, slightly dumpy, with receding grey hair and thin lips. He
was smiling.

“What
the hell just happened?” Dom looked to Jenna, to as many of the Jennas as he
could focus on, and saw that many of them were now walking across the beach to
join the dolphins. He felt inside, looking for the numbers he had carried as
his shadow, but felt nothing; they were gone, and Blake really was an ordinary
person standing beside him instead of nesting inside his head. Dom looked
around now, and realized that, aside from those that accompanied the Jennas, he
couldn’t see any numbers. It was like he’d spent all of his life in the jungle
and suddenly found himself in the deserts of Mars, the world around him airless
and lifeless. Not really paying attention to what he was doing, he reached out
and took Jenna’s mother’s hand, then staggered along after her as she walked to
join her daughter—daughters, since there were still uncountable versions of
Jenna on the beach—followed closely by Blake and Archimedes.

One Jenna
stepped ahead of the others, and by the time they’d reached her, the one he was
now thinking of as
Jenna Prime
was on her knees, stroking one
dolphin’s snout and whispering to it. The animal seemed to lean into her, and a
string of indeterminate numbers leapt from her to it and then to all the other
dolphins, a lacework of numerical electricity, and then all of the dolphins,
sixty-seven of them, were dead.

She stood, tears
in her eyes, and first hugged Dom, and then her mother. As Dom watched Jenna
with her mom, the light around her seemed to shift and crack into crazed
patterns, bending around her like a refraction through water, making her look
like a living Hockney collage. “What the hell is happening?”

“It’s all the
same,” said Jenna.

“Different,” she
said, standing a few feet away from herself.

“Changing,” said
another version.

“Infinite.”

“Impossible.”

“Probable.”

“Continuous.”

“And more, as I
reach back and forth across time.” She closed her eyes. “I can’t collapse the
wave front,” she grunted. “Can’t get out of here.” Behind her, the dead
dolphins came to life, swam back out to the ocean, at the same time festered
and rotted where they lay. The sun blinked and wavered, and new stars poked
through the bright sky. Clouds scudded in all directions at once, and in the
distance strange and marvellous beasts strolled along the horizon, seeming to
walk on the very ocean, impossibly tall and thin, stretched like a monster
child’s rubber playthings.

Jenna’s mother
stepped forward. “I don’t pretend to understand this new world of numbers you’ve
called forth, but you brought down Napier when Archimedes and I and many others
could never resist him.” She gently took her shoulders and looked into her
eyes. “Jenna, you’re my daughter. I’m so very proud of you for what you’ve
accomplished, and every bit as sorry for what I’ve done to you. But you’ve
shown great strength in dealing with everything I threw at you. You can deal
with this as well.” She leaned forward and kissed Jenna Prime on the cheek.

Sweat broke out
on Jenna’s forehead, the strain pushing hard at her. “I can,” she finally
whispered. All around, the seemingly infinite versions of Jenna folded in on
Jenna Prime, and then she stood alone on the beach, the sun now out and shining
behind her head like a halo. She smiled and held out her hand to Dom, who, with
a modicum of hesitation, reached out and took it.

“What the hell
just happened?” he asked.

“All these years
after the birth of quantum mathematics,” said Jenna’s mother, “there has been
no one who could control those numbers like a numerate could control the
standard numerical ecology.”

“No one until
me, it seems,” said Jenna. She squeezed his hand. “All I needed was an artefact
to give me the final key. Whatever I had that made the numbers avoid me unless
I concentrated on getting them, it was something I was born with.”

Dom looked
around, trying hard to see numbers. But he was like a blind man now. “So what
happened? Where did the numbers go?”

“Nowhere
and everywhere. The artefact I have came from a physicist named Werner
Heisenberg. It helps me control the numbers like I was never able to before,
but now that I’ve activated it, the ecology will never be the same. His
Uncertainty Principle and other aspects of the quantum universe are going to
rule parts of our world on a macro scale now, and I’m afraid that it won’t be
just numeracy that sees the change.”

“Wait,” said
Dom. “Is this something to do with why I kept popping into your head?”

Jenna nodded.
“Quantum entanglement, Dom. There was something about our relationship, from
the moment I first saw you. Any time I tried to use numbers, there was a brief
moment of entanglement, a melding of your numerate ecology and my unheeding
perception of the quantum world that dragged us together, and then after I was
given the artefact and began to use it, we melded for longer periods, from
further distances apart.”

Dom shook his
head, not understanding this at all. “Then how come I wasn’t in your head at
the end there?”

She smiled.
“Because I’m in control now.”

Jenna looked
back to the dead dolphins on the beach, and then removed on old, creased piece
of paper from her back pocket and placed it on the sand; part of the artefact
that had been in the box, Dom realized. As she smoothed it out, new numbers
slowly rippled outwards, disrupting the grains of sand around it, and as Dom
watched, the sky began to shift again, sideways and backwards, and a seemingly
infinite amount of sand seemed to multiply itself, every grain prepared to
introduce him to the new universe.

A lot of time
and research went into writing this novel, and as with anything that requires
so much digging around in history, I am greatly indebted to a large number of
people for their aid and counsel, and to an equally-large number of people who
stepped up with wonderful ideas and criticisms.

First and
foremost, I must thank my wife, JoAnn Murphy: yes, when we got married the
thought did occur to me that it might be useful for an author to be married to
an academic librarian, and she was indeed a help when navigating my way through
old museums and libraries in Scotland and England, but in the end it was just a
great thing to have her for company in the U.K. while tracing the path of my
heroes and villains.

This book would
not exist without my old friend Wayne Malkin, who first showed me a picture of
Napier’s Bones and who uttered the magic words that would launch the central
conceit behind this book. Thanks also go to Frank Wu, who sent me the cool
artwork for a concept that ended up being edited out of the novel, Kevin Hutchings,
Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia,
the staff at the College Heights Starbucks in Prince George, where much of the
book was written, and Judy Green in the Special Collections Library at the
University of Alberta.

For offering
wise words of criticism and support, George Murphy (my father), Douglas Smith,
David Hartwell, Nalo Hopkinson, Donald Maass, Holly Phillips, Jena Snyder, the
late, great Phyllis Gotlieb, and of course my wonderful and insightful editor
Sandra Kasturi and publisher Brett Alexander Savory.

Jay Caselberg in
London and Charles Stross in Edinburgh were kind to me when I was in their
respective cities (note to Jay: never forget the homicidal midget). Stephen
Dodson, proprietor of Languagehat (www.languagehat.com), one of the smartest
and most interesting blogs I read, was invaluable and very patient in helping
me with translations. As with any other expert advice I was given, if mistakes
are found they’re mine and mine alone.

At Napier
University in Edinburgh, Eric and Chris were a huge help, taking me on a tour
and printing off all sorts of information from the university records. I wish I
had remembered to get their last names. In the university’s library, Liz
Butchart took wonderful care of me and came up with excellent reference
material.

I was apparently
too busy to ask for their names, but I also received tremendous help from
people at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, at Lambeth Palace
Library in London, and the individual (name lost on a long-dead computer) whose
membership in a nature society led me to the wonder of the Ballachuan
Hazelwood. If nothing else came out of this project, the fact that I got to
lose myself—literally—on Seil Island for a few hours was a once-in-a-lifetime
experience. Finally, I am indebted to the Canada Council for the Arts for their
generous support in helping me complete this project.

Derryl Murphy’s
stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies over the years.
He is also the author of the ecological science fiction collection
Wasps at
the Speed of Sound
and, with co-author William Shunn, of the ghost story
Cast
a Cold Eye
. He has been nominated three times for Canada’s Aurora Award,
and anticipates that someday he’ll be nominated and lose again. He lives on the
Canadian prairies with his wife, two sons, and dog, and vaguely remembers the
day when he thought this whole writing thing would be glamourous.